US Senate opens debate on lifting visa requirements for Czechs

The United States Senate has opened a debate on whether to drop a visa requirement for visitors from the Czech Republic, Hospodarske noviny reported. A previous US insistence that a country not have more than three percent visa rejections has been replaced by other security demands, such as bio-metric passports, the paper said. A representative of the Czech Embassy in Washington, Jaroslav Kurfurst, said that while the Czech Republic had not yet won the war, a significant battle had been won on the road to visa free travel to the US.